Contemporary Epistemology and the Study of Mysticism

Summary

The essay discusses how different epistemologies and methodologies can shape our understanding of mysticism, particularly focusing on a contemporary approach called constructivism. This approach emphasizes the importance of core texts, practices, social relations, and historical contexts in shaping mystical experiences. It also critiques how such methodologies may clarify some aspects of mysticism while obscuring others. The author aims to explore these questions and the limitations of this influential approach.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Abstract What epistemologies and methodologies help us to understand the phenomena of mysticism? How do these epistemologies and methodologies clarify some aspects of these phenomena while obscuring or occluding other aspects? When we investigate mystical traditions, how and where do we look? Do we look only where we think there is more light to see? In this essay I would like to help open up these questions more by focusing especially on the limits of one influential contemporary approach, which emphasizes study of the contexts of mysticism-the core texts, practices, social relations, and historical traditions out of which a given form of mysticism develops-and the way that mystical experience is, at least in part, constructed on the basis of a particular background context. Such an approach has been recently developed in two collections of essays edited by Steven T. Katz. I will, following others in this volume, identify this approach as constructivism (although it is important to note that there are other contemporary variants of constructivism with differing assumptions).